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Benoît Mandelbrot Quotes (1924-2010)
Mathematician
About Benoît Mandelbrot
Benoît B. Mandelbrot (20 November 1924 – 14 October 2010) was a Poland-born French-American mathematician known as the "father of fractal geometry".
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“Engineering is too important to wait for science.”
“Unfortunately, the world has not been designed for the convenience of mathematicians.”
“If you have a hammer, use it everywhere you can, but I do not claim that everything is fractal.”
“A fractal is a mathematical set or concrete object that is irregular or fragmented at all scales...”
“Being a language, mathematics may be used not only to inform but also, among other things, to seduce.”
“Fractal geometry is not just a chapter of mathematics, but one that helps Everyman to see the same world differently.”
“The Mandelbrot set covers a small space yet carries a large number of different implications. Is it a fitting epitaph? Absolutely.”
“I always felt that science as the preserve of people from Oxbridge or Ivy League universities — and not for the common mortal — was a very bad idea.”
“Clouds are not spheres, mountains are not cones, coastlines are not circles, and bark is not smooth, nor does lightning travel in a straight line.”
“Given the profits he and Pharaoh must have made, one might call Joseph the first international arbitrageur.”
“A fractal is by definition a set for which the Hausdorff-Besicovitch dimension strictly exceeds the topological dimension.”
“In a different era, I would have called myself a natural philosopher. All my life, I have enjoyed the reputation of being someone who disrupted prevailing ideas. Now that I'm in my 80th year, I can play on my age and provoke people even more.”
“Most of the world is of great roughness and infinite complexity. However, the infinite sea of complexity includes two islands of simplicity: one of Euclidean simplicity and a second of relative simplicity in which roughness is present but is the same at all scales.”
“When the weather changes and hurricanes hit, nobody believes that the laws of physics have changed. Similarly, I don't believe that when the stock market goes into terrible gyrations its rules have changed. It's the same stock market with the same mechanisms and the same people.”
“My ambition was not to create a new field, but I would have welcomed a permanent group of people having interests close to mine and therefore breaking the disastrous tendency towards increasingly well-defined fields. Unfortunately, I failed on this essential point, very badly. Order doesn't come by itself.”
“A cauliflower shows how an object can be made of many parts, each of which is like a whole, but smaller. Many plants are like that. A cloud is made of billows upon billows upon billows that look like clouds. As you come closer to a cloud you don't get something smooth but irregularities at a smaller scale.”
“People want to see patterns in the world. It is how we evolved. We descended from those primates who were best at spotting the telltale pattern of a predator in the forest, or of food in the savannah. So important is this skill that we apply it everywhere, warranted or not.”
“Science would be ruined if (like sports) it were to put competition above everything else, and if it were to clarify the rules of competition by withdrawing entirely into narrowly defined specialties. The rare scholars who are nomads by choice are essential to the intellectual welfare of the subtle disciplines”
“There is a problem that is specific to financial markets. In most fields of research, when someone makes an important finding, they publish it. In the case of prices, they set up a firm and sell advice about their discovery. If they can make money from it, they will. So the research into market dynamics is a closed field.”
Benoît Mandelbrot Quotes by Topic
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Benoît Mandelbrot on Pattern 3 quotes
“My life seemed to be a series of events and accidents. Yet when I look back I see a pattern.”
Benoît Mandelbrot on Geometry 2 quotes
“I conceived, developed and applied in many areas a new geometry of nature, which finds order in chaotic shapes and processes. It grew without a name until 1975, when I coined a new word to denote it, fractal geometry, from the Latin word for irregular and broken up, fractus. Today you might say that, until fractal geometry became organized, my life had followed a fractal orbit.”
Benoît Mandelbrot on Engineering
“Engineering is too important to wait for science.”
Benoît Mandelbrot on Banking
Benoît Mandelbrot on Arrogance
“An extraordinary amount of arrogance is present in any claim of having been the first in "inventing" something. It's an arrogance that some enjoy, and others do not. Now I reach beyond arrogance when I proclaim that fractals had been pictured forever but their true role remained unrecognized and waited for me to be uncovered.”
Benoît Mandelbrot on Stock market
“The most important thing I have done is to combine something esoteric with a practical issue that affects many people. In this spirit, the stock market is one of the most attractive things imaginable. Stock-market data is abundant so I can check everything. Financial markets are very influential and I want to be part of this field now that it is maturing.”
Benoît Mandelbrot on Welfare
“Financial markets are the machines in which much of human welfare is decided; yet we know more about how our car engines work than about how our global financial system functions. We lurch from crisis to crisis. In a networked world, mayhem in one market spreads instantaneously to all others—and we have only the vaguest of notions how this happens, or how to regulate it.”
What Benoît Mandelbrot Said About Others
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Benoît Mandelbrot on John von Neumann 3 quotes
“Much later, I was to find that my view of Von Neumann as a great man was completely confirmed.”
Quotes About Benoît Mandelbrot
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John D. Barrow on Benoît Mandelbrot
“If musical appreciation is a by-product of a more general pattern-processing propensity of the brain, then why are our senses heightened by pink noises? It is significant that the world around us is full of variations with 1/f spectra. Benoit Mandelbrot has pioneered the study of natural and computer-generated patterns that are scale-free. (He calls them fractals...) Mandelbrot draws attention to the fact that there is a pattern to the noise spectrum displayed by the human nervous system. At the extremities of the body... it tends to be of white-noise form; but, as one approaches closer to the central nervous system and the brain, these variations become 1/f-like. Our nervous system may act as a spectral filter to prevent the brain from being swamped with uninteresting white background noise about the world...”
About Benoît Mandelbrot
Benoît B. Mandelbrot (20 November 1924 – 14 October 2010) was a Poland-born French-American mathematician known as the "father of fractal geometry".